abstract = "Voice over IP (VoIP) speech quality estimation is
crucial to providing optimal Quality of Service (QoS).
we seek to provide improved speech quality estimation
models with better prediction accuracy by considering a
richer set of input features than the current
International Telecommunications
Union-Telecommunication (ITU-T) recommendations. It
addresses a transitional phase, where wideband (WB)
networks are becoming available. However, they have to
co-exist with the existing narrowband (NB) setups for
the time being. Quality estimation becomes a challenge
in such a mixed context. The ITU-T recommendation
(termed E-Model) has recently been extended to deal
with the mixed context. However, it evaluates the
speech degradation in the WB scenario based solely on
codec related distortions (only a subset of factors
affecting the speech quality on a VoIP network). The
extension is derived out of speech signals evaluated by
human subjects: an expensive and difficult to reproduce
exercise. we innovate by considering a number of other
network distortion types as well to produce generalised
models that predict the quality degradation to a higher
accuracy. To this end, an extensive set of speech
samples is subjected to a wide variety of distortions.
The degraded signals are evaluated by the currently
best available algorithmic approximation of human
evaluation of speech to produce quality scores. Using
the distortions as the input features and targeting the
quality scores, we employ Genetic Programming to
produce parsimonious models that show considerable
prediction gain compared to the E-Model. As against
some existing approaches, where the models are tailored
to various telephony codecs, the evolved models
generalise across a variety of modern codecs.",
notes = "GECCO-2008 A joint meeting of the seventeenth
international conference on genetic algorithms
(ICGA-2008) and the thirteenth annual genetic
programming conference (GP-2008).
ACM Order Number 910081. Also known as \cite{1389402}",